Brit Bennett - The Vanishing Half

“Mama, a man,” she said, and there was Early standing on the front steps, jacket collar flipped up, his beard flecked with raindrops. Desiree scrambled to her feet, feeling strangely nervous, and she didn’t realize until she opened the door that they were standing exactly where they’d first met a lifetime ago.

“You can come in,” she said.

“You sure?” he said. “Don’t wanna make no mess.”

He looked as nervous as she felt, which emboldened her. She beckoned him inside, and he kicked his boots against the porch, shucking off mud. Then he followed her, standing in the doorway, one hand balled up in his jacket pocket.

“This is Jude,” she said. “Jude, come say hi to Mr. Early. I’m goin on a little drive with him, remember?”

“It’s just Early,” he said. “I ain’t nobody’s mister.”

He smiled, holding out his hand. Jude slid hers into his for a second, then darted off into the bedroom to fetch her book bag. Later, on the interstate, Early asked if Jude was always so quiet.

Desiree gazed out the window, watching the sunlight glint off Lake Pontchartrain.

“Always,” she said. “She ain’t like me at all.”

“Like her daddy, then?”

She didn’t like talking about Sam to Early, didn’t even want to imagine both men existing within the same expanse of her life. Besides, Jude wasn’t like Sam either. She was, in a way, like Stella. Private, like if she told you anything about herself, she was giving away something she could never get back.

“No,” she said. “Not like anybody but herself.”

“That’s good. For a girl to be herself.”

“Not in Mallard,” she said. “Not a girl like Jude.”

Early touched her hand, surprising her, then remembering himself, he pulled away.

“Won’t be easy,” he said. “Wasn’t easy for me. You know a man smacked me once at church? Right on the back of my neck. All because I put my finger in the holy water before his wife. Like I ruined it somehow. I thought my uncle was gonna stick up for me. I don’t know why, I just thought. But he told the man sorry like I done somethin wrong.”

He let out a bitter laugh. On the other side of the interstate, a freight train rumbled along, rainwater sloughing off the tracks. She turned back to him, eyes also wet.

“I should’ve said somethin,” she said. “When my mama run you off like that.”

He shrugged. “Long time ago.”

“So why you helping me then? Why really.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Guess it make me sad, thinkin about you and your sister.” He stared ahead, refusing to look at her. “And I guess I just like talkin with you. Ain’t talked to no woman so much in all my life.”

She laughed. “You ain’t said but two words at a time.”

“It’s enough,” he said.

She laughed again, touching the back of his neck, and later, he would tell her that was the first time he knew. That gentle hand on the back of his neck as he steered the car across the bridge.

—

THEY WERE CHASING THE PAST, searching for Stella down streets and stairwells and alleyways.

Trampling up the steps of the twins’ three-story walk-up, where an elderly colored couple now lived. Desiree asked, as politely as she could, if they might have received any mail intended for a Desiree or Stella Vignes, but they’d only lived there for two years. The lives of the twin girls had already faded into the apartment walls long before they’d arrived. Sisters cooking together, listening to the little transistor radio that had been their first luxury purchase. Sisters staying up until dawn, feeling finally like the grown women they believed themselves to be. Sisters signing the lease to that first apartment, although maybe even then, Stella had known that the arrangement would be temporary. Maybe she had already started searching for a way out.

All afternoon, they hunted Stella in the old spots. They asked after her in Dixie Laundry and the Grace Note. Desiree searched for old friends in the phone book but nobody had heard from Stella. Farrah Thibodeaux, married now to an alderman, laughed when Desiree called.

“I can’t believe little Stella’s run off,” she said. “Now you, I would’ve thought . . .”

“Thanks anyway,” Desiree said, starting to hang up.

“Wait a minute,” Farrah said. “I don’t know what your hurry is. I was going to tell you I saw your sister.”

Her heart quickened. “When?”

“Oh, a long time ago. Before you left. She was walkin down Royal Street, just as carefree as she could be. Arm in arm with a white man too. Looked right at me, then looked the other way. I swear she saw me.”

“You sure it was her?”

“As sure that it wasn’t you,” Farrah said. “It’s all in her eyes, honey. Her white man was handsome too. Must’ve been why she was smiling like that.”

Stella leaving her to chase after some man. Stella secretly in love. Stella, who had never been boy crazy, who had rolled her eyes at Desiree mooning over Early, who had never even had a boyfriend before. The frigid twin, the boys called her. But Early told her that the simplest explanation is often the right one.

“You be surprised by what emotion make people do,” he said.

“But I know her,” she said, then stopped herself. She couldn’t assume anything about Stella anymore. Hadn’t she learned that already?

She was exhausted by the time Early suggested she try the Maison Blanche building. She’d only ventured inside once before, days after Stella first disappeared. She’d told herself, riding the streetcar down Canal, that Stella couldn’t be gone for good. This was Stella, fallen into one of her bad moods. Stella playing hide-and-seek, ducking behind the drying sheets. She told herself lots of reassuring things she didn’t believe. Stella would pop back up. She would appear on their apartment stoop and explain herself. She wouldn’t walk away from the best job she’d ever had. She wouldn’t leave her sister behind.

Inside the department store, Desiree had wandered, walking slowly down the perfume aisle. She knew that Stella worked in an office on one of the top floors but she didn’t know which one. In the lobby, she studied the directory so long, the brusque security guard asked what her business was. She’d faltered, afraid to expose Stella, and he finally shooed her away.

“Too pushy,” Early said. “You gotta have a soft touch. You come across too desperate, folks sense it. Clam up.”

They were sitting in a café across the street from Maison Blanche. She’d barely touched her espresso. She was still thinking about the white man Farrah saw Stella with. How happy she’d looked. She didn’t want to be found. What was Desiree doing, trying to drag her back into a life she no longer wanted?

“You gotta go in there like somebody they tell things to,” he said. “Somebody that gets what she wants.”

“Be white, you mean.”

He nodded. “Easier that way,” he said. “I can’t go in with you. Give you away. But you just go in, say you lookin for somebody. An old friend. Not your sister, that raise too many questions. Tell ’em you lost touch, somethin like that. Just keep it light, breezy. Like a white lady with no worry on her mind.”

So she imagined herself as Stella—not the Stella she once knew but Stella as she was now. Pushing past the giant brass MB door handles, stepping inside the department store. She passed through the perfume aisle with the confidence of a woman who could buy any bottle she wished. She stopped to smell a few, as if she were considering a purchase. Admired the jewelry in the display case, glanced at the fine handbags, demurred when salesgirls approached her. In the lobby, the colored elevator operator gazed at the floor when she stepped on. She ignored him, the way Stella might have. She felt queasy at how simple it was. All there was to being white was acting like you were.